So there's a movement among some conservatives to have a ticker-tape parade of appreciation for the returning Iraq vets. But is this really appropriate? Obama, no fan of the military, has been criticized by republicans for celebrating World Series victories more than returning veterans, but what did our veterans win?
Usually a parade is held when somebody wins something. Did we win the war in Iraq and I missed it? I'm not saying we shouldn't be thankful for the sacrifices made by service members in Iraq, but having a parade just because the President brought the troops home in the middle of a war doesn't make sense.
To show support and appreciation for the troops, I suggest that every time you see a uniformed service member in an airport lounge or neighborhood restaurant, buy him or her a drink or pay for their meal, anonymously. That's far more personal, they'll appreciate that more, and it doesn't look like we're celebrating a victory after the first round of the playoffs.
12 comments:
@Ed "I'm not saying we shouldn't be thankful for the sacrifices made by service members in Iraq...."
And what U.S. servicemen and women sacrificed were the lives of one and a half million Iraqi men, women and children, none of whom deserved what we did to them and to their country.
Without even searching, I'm pretty sure we haven't indiscriminately killed 1.5million Iraqi civilians. I think the number is more like 100k-300k...nothing to dismiss for sure, but not in the millions. Plus, enemy combatant deaths are included in most body counts because they cowardly dress as civilians.
Look Isaac, I'm not defending our adventure in Iraq, but any functioning country must have a military that follows orders, good, bad, or ugly, or the whole system breaks down. Punish the generals and politicians who prosecuted the war, but don't fault the 999 out of every 1,000 who served honorably and followed orders to attempt to assist Iraq into the modern world with representative government.
Ed, please stop with the "we were just trying to help Iraq into the modern world" fiction, O.K.?
You know as well as I do that wars are NEVER fought for the stated reasons. In this case, the "modern world" nonsense wasn't even the stated reason. It was an ad hoc excuse contrived after the 9-11 and WMD justifications fell to the ground.
Besides that, Iraq had one of the highest standards of living in the Middle East prior to our unprovoked and obscene aggression. We didn't help Iraq into the modern world; we bombed them back into the Stone Age.
"Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered In US War And Occupation Of Iraq 1,455,590"
(quoted from informationclearinghouseDOTinfo/)
Of course Isaac, by "highest standard of living" you mean when they weren't being gassed to death, executed by the hundreds, or tortured in the rape rooms, etc.?
I'll concede that among the hated military/industrial/political/banking complexes there might have been people who had other motives, but for a lot of the politicians and American people in general, bringing relative peace, liberty, and representative government to a tyrannical dictatorship is a noble undertaking. And I guarantee that was the motive for the service people stationed there.
Just stop, already. WE brought the Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq* and as long as it was useful to U.S. interests of the moment we made sure that it stayed in power. We didn't care who got raped, tortured or killed.
Later, during our occupation of Iraq, we were the ones doing the raping, torturing and killing - in numbers far greater than Saddam Hussein.
You would have us believe that our raping, torturing and killing was for the Iraqis' own good. No objective person believes that for a minute.
*"On February 8, 1963, a combination of Ba’athists, Nasserists, and right-wing nationalists staged another military coup and seized power. The U.S. CIA directly provided the Ba’ath Party with lists of suspected communists, left-leaning intellectuals, progressives, and radical nationalists. On the night of the coup, the new Ba’ath regime used these lists to massacre between 3,000 and 5,000 people. Washington immediately offered diplomatic recognition. One Ba’ath Party cadre later admitted, 'we came to power on an American train.'" (L. Everest, Oil, Power & Empire, 2003)
Are you insane Isaac? We did the raping and torture? Who did it?
It has always been our policy to support regimes who are relatively friendly to our interests and when they become unfriendly, we no longer support them. We might even topple them if they get too unfriendly.
Should we be doing that as much as we do? Probably not. But that's how the US operates....we buy friendship and good behavior around the world and then we punish bad behavior....like children. If we, as Ron Paul would have us do, ignore everything that goes on in other countries, the world economy would collapse from the various wars that would take place and the humanitarian crisis would dwarf anything we've seen to date.
I believe we should do a good bit less nation building than we do and intervene only when nothing else works.
Were the stories of Iraqi "rape rooms" more neo-con lies?
Memo To: Attorney General John Ashcroft
From: Jude Wanniski
June 24, 2004
[…]
"To tell you the truth, John, as far as I can recall, there have been no assertions of the “brutality” of Saddam’s regime from anyone but the Iraqi exiles associated with Ahmet Chalabi or those Kurds who fought on the Iranian side in the Iran/Iraq war. There are all kinds of anecdotes about Saddam doing dreadful things, entire books written about them, but the source of all of them is the same pool of people who have been feeding faked “evidence” of WMD and Al Qaeda connections to our government."
[…]
This "rape room" business may be propaganda (16.Dec.2003)
Regarding your inquiry as to what are "rape rooms", it is my suspicion that this is a contrived term being used by the Powers That Be and their lackey mainstream media as a new buzz word to further indoctrinate the hapless American sheeple as to the "badness" of Saddam Hussein and company. It's rather basic tactic from any PROPAGANDA 101 textbook.
-Portland Independent Media Center
(Like the made-up story of Iraqi soldiers ripping Kuwait babies from incubators, say? -I.A.N.)
[…]
"Bremer and Bush must be commended for their public stance against rape, but their words were utter fantasy. They get a 100% score for lying. There were no rape rooms in Iraq and the actions Bremer stated are more in tune with what the U.S. brought to Iraq, not what was there before March 2003.
The facts show that instead of halting rape epidemics in countries the U.S. invades, the occupiers introduce rape to these nations; nations in which rape was virtually non-existent."
[snip]
"Rape is now commonplace in much of Iraq. U.S. soldiers and civilians are equal opportunity participants; they have raped U.S. and Iraqi women. Unfortunately, it is not only U.S. citizens who are the aggressors. Some members of Shia "death squads" have taken lessons from the occupiers and are now using rape as a security tool. Whether it be an Iraqi or an American, virtually no offenders have been brought to justice. In one case last year, a woman accused several Iraqi policemen of raping her. The evidence showed that she was violated. Within a day, Maliki not only refuted the woman’s accusations, he gave medals of commendation to the rapists. After all, he was following the lead of his U.S. puppeteers."
EXPORTING RAPE
Malcom Lagauche
12/31/2011
Dude, where do you get this stuff? And how do you verify that it's more trustworthy than the opposite anecdotal evidence?
Dude, where do you get this stuff?
I do research. I don't accept ANYTHING the State says at face value. Not all liars are leaders but all leaders are liars.
And how do you verify that it's more trustworthy than the opposite anecdotal evidence?
"The first casualty of war is truth." (Erroneously credited to US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson.)
The Bush administration lied* about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction.
It lied about mobile biological weapons labs.
It lied about Iraqi soldiers tossing babies out of incubators.
It lied about there being mass graves full of dead Kuwaitis.
It lied when it linked Iraq to 9-11.
It lied when it linked Iraq to Al Quaeda.
It lied about yellow cake from Niger.
It even lied about "mission accomplished"
And we now know that it lied about Iraqi rape rooms, too.
*"President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq." ~Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith (source: wwwDOTbingDOTcom/images/search?q=bush+iraq+lies&view=detail&id=736B6236F0658F3B53AB5EE33965D9C14F4A3CB2&first=0&FORM=IDFRIR)
"There is nothing here any more. Nothing. For thirty years Saddam built Iraq, and now it is destroyed. There are more sick than before [Saddam], more hungry. The people don't have services. People are being killed every day in the tens, if not hundreds. We are all victims of America and Britain. They killed our country." ~Tareq Aziz
"...every time you see a uniformed service member in an airport lounge or neighborhood restaurant, buy him or her a drink or pay for their meal...." ~Ed
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